Archive for the 'Technology News' Category
Apple’s Superlative Sequel: The Latest iPod Touch
They say sequels often fail to live up to the original. That’s not so with the second generation of Apple’s iPod touch. Apple has managed to construct the touch look better, work better, and deliver more features — all for a $229 starting price, significantly cheaper than the previous entry-level $299 version. The changes, while subtle, are so significant that I give the second-generation touch a rare perfect score.
The touch, while an iPod, is close to the iPhone in lineage. It has the same touchscreen, plays music and videos the same way, and includes a wireless Web connection that lets you access the Web from your home network and wireless hotspots, such as those set up by AT&T in Starbucks.
Apple tweaked the look of the touch, too. It’s a lot thinner than the previous touch, measuring 4.1 inches by 2.4 inches by 0.33 inches, and weighs a scant 4.05 ounces. The back sports a contoured stainless steel casing, whereas the updated iPhone switches to glossy black or white plastic.
New Speakers
A year ago, when I reviewed the original touch, many readers took me to task for complaining that there was no committed volume button for music and no built-in speaker for listening to music without headphones. In the new generation, Apple’s engineers addressed both complaints by adding a rocker volume button on the left side and speakers on the bottom. The plus added software to let you fetch e-mail and use other applications previously limited to the iPhone.
Perhaps the biggest shocker is Apple’s decision to sell $29 headphones with a built-in microphone. The upshot? Users can download third-party applications from iTunes that will turn a Web-connected touch into a Skype phone. In effect, the combination of features turns your touch into a poor man’s iPhone, letting you compose cheap calls anywhere…
Orginal post by Mike
A Yahoo Acquisition Is Out, Microsoft CEO Says
Microsoft Corp. is no longer interested in buying all of Yahoo Inc., CEO Steve Ballmer said Wednesday, though he told shareholders that the company would still be “very open” to a collaboration on Web search. His comments sent Yahoo shares diving more than 20 percent.
“Let me be clear,” Ballmer said at Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting. “We are done with all acquisition discussions with Yahoo.”
Yahoo spurned a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft in May, and later rejected Microsoft’s bid to buy only its search engine. Ballmer has said repeatedly of late that the buyout remains off the table, though a search-related deal is possible.
But Wednesday marked the first duration he had renewed that stance since the resignation announced that week by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who had resisted Microsoft’s overtures. Yahoo shares rose when Yang said he would step aside, considering investors hoped it meant a deal with Microsoft would now be more likely.
Ballmer said the companies are not currently talking about a search deal.
Yahoo shares plummeted $2.41, or 20.9 percent, to close at $9.14, its lowest level since early 2003, on a split-adjusted basis, and well below the $33 per share Microsoft offered in May. Microsoft shares tumbled $1.33 cents, 6.8 percent, to end the session at $18.29, a 10-year low.
Michael McDonald, a shareholder who flew from Atlanta to attend the meeting, blames Microsoft’s run at Yahoo for depressing its share price and hopes the software maker doesn’t try again.
McDonald, a retired advertising executive, called the race to win in Web search and advertising “the dot-com bubble all by again. The economic period we’re in now is going to prove the questionable value of search.”
Instead, he’d rather see Microsoft cut employees and expenses, or spend cash to buy business software companies.
“We don’t need three Googles,” he said.
Some analysts…
Orginal post by Mike
Yahoo’s Search for a Leader Raises a Strategic Question
There is a new parlor game in Silicon Valley: guessing who will replace Jerry Yang at the helm of the troubled Web giant Yahoo.
Yang, a Yahoo co-founder, said Monday that he would relinquish the chief executive role once a successor is named and revert to being “chief Yahoo,” the strategy position he held before his 18 turbulent months of running the company.
But even before a new boss is selected, Yahoo has an even more fundamental decision to produce, analysts and other Web watchers say. Does it want to remain an independent company, trying to grow in a range of businesses while it fights Google in the crucial arena of Web search? Or should it finally listen to the devotees of deal-making and sell some or all of itself to another Net player, most likely Microsoft?
Yahoo shareholders are clearly rooting for a deal. Shares of Yahoo rose 8.7 percent, or 92 cents, Tuesday to $11.55, largely on hopes that Yang’s departure might help push the company into the arms of an acquirer.
Steven Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has said he has no interest in making another bid for Yahoo, but he has expressed repeated interest in buying Yahoo’s search business. Many observers and Net veterans agree that that remains the company’s most appealing option.
“Yahoo is still in many ways the definitive sort of the consumer Net, but I don’t think they can or should compete with Google any longer,” said Ross Levinsohn, a former president of Fox Interactive Media. “That game is by.”
whether the Yahoo board agrees, it will want an experienced chief executive with a history of deal-making who is plus capable of running the online media properties left behind.
Potential candidates who could embrace that vision of Yahoo include Peter Chernin, the president of the News Corp.; Jonathan Miller, a former…
Orginal post by Mike
Microsoft Works To Help Media in Europe
In a move to redefine the often testy relationship within online publishers and search engines, Microsoft plans to help European media owners protect and profit from copyrighted material online, the company’s top intellectual property lawyer, Thomas Rubin, said Wednesday.
Rubin said Microsoft planned to work more closely with publishers on the development of a new technological standard that would give them more control by what happens to their material after it has been referenced by search engines like Microsoft’s Live Search, Google and Yahoo.
The standard, called the Automated substance Access Protocol, “has the potential to be an fundamental element of more vibrant business models for publishers in the future,” Rubin said, in the text of a speech prepared for delivery Thursday in London.
His comments, while stopping short of a full embrace, are the strongest endorsement of the new standards by any of the major search engines, which follow fierce clashes amoung Google and publishers by copyright issues.
The Automated composition Access Protocol was introduced a year ago, and is supported by hundreds of publishers, said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council.
So far, though, no major search engines have adopted the system. Instead, they use a 15-year-old program called robots.txt. To ensure that their articles turn up in searches, publishers additionally have to keep using robots.txt, which gives them little control by what happens to their material after it has been released on the Web.
Rubin said adoption of the new protocol could energize publishers to build additional data available in digital mold. Some newspaper publishers, for instance, have been reluctant to open their archives online.
Complicating the battles within search engines and copyright owners is a disagreement by how best to profit from the rise of the Net. Some newspaper publishers, for instance, try to form it as easy as…
Orginal post by Mike
Retail Web Sites Wage Pre-Holiday Price Wars
As abandoned malls and agency stores struggle to court cash-short consumers with steep discounts that holiday season, a similar and even more ferocious price war is being waged online.
Web retailers, trying to navigate what is shaping up to be the first truly dreary holiday shopping season on the Web, are engaging in price-cutting and discounting so aggressive it threatens their profit margins and, in some cases, their survival.
For example, Sony introduced its HDR-SR11 high-definition digital video recorder in April with a suggested retail price of $1,200. that week, Dell.com was selling it for $899, and the electronics retailer Abe’s of Maine had it on its site for $750 — and both were throwing in free shipping.
At Lori’s Designer Shoes, a Web site that sells women’s accessories, a brown leather Hype tote bag started at $338, fell to $246 and is now available with a 20 percent reduction coupon for $196.80 . Lori Andre, the owner, said she generally tried to avoid online promotions “because next you train the customer and they’ll expect that, and you’re not going to compose any money.” But last week, traffic hit a wall and sales on the site fell by nearly a quarter. “We’ve been in business for 25 years and never seen the bottom drop out like that,” she said.
Traditional retailers are facing the same problem, and discounts are proliferating from suburban malls to Fifth Avenue. The price-cutting, though, is fiercest on the Web, where customers can easily shop for the best price with a quick search on Google or on specialized shopping engines such as Shopping.com. Online, the competition is only a go away. For many Web sites, the discounts and price cuts are the only way to hold on to customers as online buying unexpectedly plummets. The research company comScore reported…
Orginal post by Mike
Securing Your Wireless Network
In the light of recent events where terrorists have allegedly used unsecure Wi-Fi networks to send e-mails, you can take some relatively simple steps to protect your connection from being misused. Wi-Fi or Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN), or, to give it its technical name, 802.11 wireless protocol, is still extremely convenient, both in office and home, given that all contemporary laptops and high-end mobile devices have receivers to pick up these signals. The latest 802.11n specification is additionally quite fast and supports the higher broadband speeds that come into the WLAN router.
You can secure your connection by following these three simple steps. However, keep in mind that these are only tips and much like a car defense system, only offer a slightly enhanced level of protection. A determined hacker can still break into any network without enterprise levels of protection.
Disable SSID broadcasting
Most Wi-Fi routers broadcast their network name using the Service Set Identifier (SSID) to the world every few seconds, which makes it easy for society to move from one wireless access area to another but humans rarely change the network’s default name. Disabling the SSID might help whether your access device mobile or computer usually stays in the signal area. Constantly moving in and out of the Wi-Fi signal could lead to slow or dropped connections. But you additionally must keep in mind that many contemporary devices can detect and access ‘Hidden WLAN’ networks where the SSID is disabled.
Don’t keep your Wi-Fi Router near a window or the outside wall of your house. that is not a hardware tip, but simple common sense. A Wi-Fi router does not send a uni-directional signal (though some contemporary routers do). A Wi-Fi router placed near a window or outside wall will leak signals to the world, which can be picked…
Orginal post by Mike
‘Fake Steve Jobs’ Stops Blogging as the ‘Real Dan’
It was poor decent when Dan Lyons stopped sharing his musings about the technology scene in a hilarious satire of what Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs would be like as a blogger.
Now there’s more sad news for readers who savored his biting humor: The erstwhile “Fake Steve Jobs” has decided to stop blogging as the “Real Dan Lyons” after he was reprimanded by his bosses at Newsweek magazine for an acerbic remark about Yahoo Inc.
The trouble started Monday evening when Lyons assailed Yahoo for giving him what he believed to be misleading info while he was writing a Newsweek piece last month.
Monday’s announcement that Yahoo founder Jerry Yang had decided to step down as chief executive riled Lyons considering Chairman Roy Bostock had assured him just a few weeks ago that Yang “is the right person to continue to lead Yahoo.” That sounded different from that statement Bostock released Monday: “We all agree that now is the right instance to prepare the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level.”
Citing his Bostock interview and other perceived deceptions, Lyons compared Yahoo’s public relations team to dishonest bags of dung — only in much more colorful terms.
After Yahoo complained, his bosses agreed his language wasn’t appropriate for a blog connected to Newsweek, which is owned by The Washington Post Co. Lyons decided to remove the post — as well other potentially offensive entries — to avoid trouble with his new employer (he started writing for Newsweek in September).
Yahoo declined to comment on Lyons’ criticism of the company or its decision to complain to his bosses.
Rather than risk another dustup, Lyons wrote in a Wednesday e-mail that he won’t construct any more blog posts. He stopped writing on “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” in July.
Lyons played…
Orginal post by Mike
